Chapter XIV. The Mormon Iliad

The Abrahamic Covenant. Its Infinite Scope and Significance. Its Renewal with Joseph and his Israel.

Jehovah's epic !

There is no other defining that will adequately express the subject and themes grasped by the genius of the Mormon Prophet.

The covenant of old, which Jehovah made with the Hebrew sires, renewed in Joseph and his people.

A covenant that has come down in the august syllabling of three civilizations.

A covenant, not in its incipiency to-day, but now working towards its millennial consummation.

Former-day Israel and Latter-day Israel have thus the same centre of faith in this covenant made by Jehovah with Abraham, and the same consummation of that faith in the coming- of Messiah and the restoration of the kingdom to Israel.

The strictly Israelitish genius of Mormonism thus emphasized at the outset, we are prepared to review the Abrahamic theme in its everlasting sweep, and to apply it to the peculiar experience of Israel in the former and the latter days.

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, " Get thee

out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee," etc.

But the Hebrew Patriarch has written his own history. It is contained in the "Book of Abraham," translated by the Prophet Joseph.

This extraordinary book has entered largely into Mormon theology, and has given pronouncement to some of its most beautiful themes.

In the land of the Chaldeans, in the house of his father, Abraham saw that it was needful for him to obtain another abiding place, in consequence of the idolatry that surrounded him. He had come of the sacred lineage to which belonged the Priesthood, and was himself " a High Priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers." " It was conferred upon me," he says, "from the fathers; it came down from the fathers from the beginning of time.

" I sought for mine appointment unto the priesthood according to the appointment of God unto the fathers concerning the seed. My fathers having turned from their righteousness, and from the holy commandments which the Lord their God had given unto them, unto the worshipping of the gods of the heathen, utterly refused to hearken to my voice."

Therefore the Lord had said unto Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee."

Moses in his record is not circumstantial touching the immediate cause of this command to Abraham, yet he was doubtless familiar therewith. It is certain that Mahomet, the prophet of Ishmael,

understood it as rendered by Joseph, for he opens the Koran with this annunciation of faith :

"We believe in Abraham, the. orthodox, who was no idolater."

Jehovah commanded Abraham to leave the land of idolatry, that he might establish in his ministry and race his own supreme name. For this made he the covenant with Abraham.

According to Joseph's revelations, the covenant was simply renewed in Abraham, and not originated. Like the priesthood with which it is connected, it had come down to the Hebrew sire from the righteous fathers. It was first made with Adam.

From Jehovah it came to the Patriarch of the Earth, for Jehovah is the God of the covenant. From Adam to Seth, Enoch and Noah; being several times renewed by the Lord before the days of Abraham. The same also is this which has been renewed in Joseph in these latter days.

Both the priesthood and the covenant existed before the beginning- of time or the creation of the earth. They are not of time, but of eternity, — the everlasting chains which link the heavens and the earth, and connect the race of mortals with the races of immortals that have gone up into their exaltation before them.

Thus has Joseph enlarged our conceptions of the priesthood, of the covenant, of religion.

The signature of the Everlasting is on the whole.

Interpreted by the genius that inspired Joseph, the everlasting covenant has an infinite scope and significance. In the action of his own dispensation he shows us the very face of the covenant which

Jehovah renewed in Abraham, and reveals it as the covenant that had come down through generations of worlds.

This is masonry, indeed, in the light of which Solomon in his temple at Jerusalem was but an apprentice, learning its august mysteries. Jehovah, not Solomon, is Grand Master of this.

Of old the gods of Olympus had their epic. Grecian mythology incarnates it. Homer, with wondrous success, embodied it in a great poem. He was its Prophet. His Iliad is the Bible of the Greeks.

But it was left to Joseph to incarnate the epic of Jehovah ! Not even did Moses as much as he, for he has swept the whole subject, with its themes, down to the " dispensation of the fullness of times," with Jesus not less than Moses as the expounder and fulfiller of the covenant.

The Mormon Prophet is the only religious lawgiver that has arisen in a thousand years who has attempted to construct an epic system of faith. The very word epic, in modern times, has lost nearly all its meaning. Even the poets have ceased to work upon the conception ; yet has Joseph made it so vast, with Jehovah as the inspiring genius, that it swallows up all the conceptions of the ancients.

But follow we Moses again, with whom the reader will be most familiar.

"And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God. Walk before me, and be thou perfect. * * *

" Behold my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations.

" Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham ; for a father of many nations have I made thee.

" And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.

"And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and thy seed after thee."

The covenant is thus seen to be a race covenant, and the Abrahamic religion a race religion. Thus in Adam ; thus in Noah; thus in the Hebrew sire. These appear to be the patriarchal trinity of the earth.

In this covenant came woman with man, as at the beginning : " Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth " with a chosen seed, in whom Jehovah shall fulfill his matchless purposes.

At first, Adam and Eve ; afterwards Abraham and Sarah.

But Sarah for a time was as a barren tree. As a woman in old age yearning for the hope of her youth, went she, — the mother of the covenant, — toward the grave with an unfulfilled covenant upon her head. Then gave she unto Abraham her handmaid Hagar, that the covenant of the Lord might not be void. For the Lord had said unto him :

" I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth : so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.

The divine story is continued in Sarah and Hagar, with their sons Isaac and Ishmael:

" And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be.

" And I will bless her, and give thee a son of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations ; kings of people shall be of her.

" Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?

" And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee !

" And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him, for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.

"And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.

" But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year."

What an imperial sweep is here ! Can any question what religion meant between Abraham and his God ?

Nations and kings were to come of the Hebrew patriarch! Empires were to be born of him ! Civilizations were to proceed from the two lines of his sons, Isaac and Ishmael, in which all the nations of the earth should be embraced. None of the gods of the heathen ever conceived an economy so vast, or undertook purposes so universal.

Jehovah has indeed shown himself supreme ; and the fact that he has renewed the whole in Joseph and his latter-day Israel, proves that he has not forgotten his covenant nor given up his wondrous purposes.

In Isaac and Jacob the oath of Jehovah was continued. In Jacob the tribes of the chosen race were defined. Of him the Twelve Patriarchs. In him the nationality of Israel was born.

Down into Egypt next, there to remain until Israel became a people in whom Jehovah could show the majesty of his will and the might of his arm.

A people in slavery making bricks for their taskmasters "without straw;" yet a people with a marvelous destiny upon their heads.

Then a Moses leading Israel out of Egypt, with the Angel of the Covenant going before the sacred people, delivering them with the outstretched arm of Jehovah's power, and with signs and wonders that appal the hosts of Pharaoh.

Afterwards Moses with Israel in the wilderness. There they abide for a generation before -entering the land of promise, that their commonwealth might be unfolded and the law revealed.

And lastly, as the grandest act of all in the Mosaic drama, we come to Moses bringing all Israel under the covenant made with their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

" Ye stand this day all of you before the Lord your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Israel.

" Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water:

" That thou shouldst enter into covenant with the Lord thy God, and into his oath, which the Lord thy God maketh with thee this day:

"That he may establish thee to-day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. ******

" And it shall come to pass if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth. * *

"And the Lord shall establish thee a holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways.

" And all the people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord ; and they shall be afraid of thee. * * *

"And the Lord shall make thee head, and not the tail ; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath."

Thus began Jehovah's covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ; thus was it continued with Moses and the Prophets; and thus has it been renewed with Joseph and his Israel in these latter-days.

Marvelous, indeed, that a covenant belonging to the early ages of man, — a covenant which seemed

to have died with the nationality of Israel before the Christian era began, — should suddenly revive in all its ancient force in the religion and action of the Nineteenth Century.

Quite as wonderful that it should spring up in America, where civilizations are culminating- and all things are becoming new.

Yet did our Prophet render the covenant as literally in the dispensation that was given unto him, as it was rendered in Israel by the great Hebrew lawgiver more than three thousand years ago.

A wondrously dramatic picture was that of Moses just before his death, bringing all Israel under the covenant and into the oath of Jehovah. It has scarcely a parallel in all history. It has none, certainly, excepting that given by the Mormon people.

But not more wonderful was the example of Moses and ancient Israel, in the wilderness by the Red Sea, than was that of Joseph, in Kirtland, in the very midst of the Gentiles, bringing his modern Israel under the covenant and " into the oath of the Lord."

More marked is this, from the very anomaly of the surroundings and the inharmony of the times. It is a unique that carries the imagination directly back to the days of the patriarchs of the earth. They come up from the past as gods risen to renew their work in the action of the present.

None but the genius of Jehovah could have inspired such a dispensation as that which Joseph opened.

The covenant is no accident, nor an incidental

filling in of a new faith. It is the very basis of the religion, and its genius gives all the volume and tone of the history of the Latter-day people.

Joseph began, not with Jesus and his apostles, but with Jehovah and Abraham. Isaac and Jacob, in whom the oath of the Lord was confirmed and the sacred nation begat, stood to our Prophet before Peter and Paul, in the divine purposes.

True, the dispensation of Jesus was brought into the infinite embrace of Mormonism as one superior to that of Moses and the Prophets; but the works of the Father are considered before the works of the Son, and the name of the Father honored first. Thus did Jesus himself.

In Jehovah, not Jesus, is the origin of the everlasting covenant and priesthood. Surely this is not blasphemy. It is truly a significant sign of the heathenish spirit of Romish Christianity, that any disciple of Hebrew faith should find it necessary to thus guard the mighty God of Israel.

Jesus honored the Father. Constant was his affirmation that he came not in his own name, but in the name of the Father; not to do his own will, but the will of him that sent him: " Father, not my will but thine be done !"

So began Joseph the faith of the saints in Jehovah— the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Therefore commenced he with the covenant which Jehovah made with Abraham, and which has been renewed in a Latter-day Israel.

Be this ever understood as the Alpha of Mormonism— the beginning of the "dispensation of the fullness of times."

Joseph well taught the saints the wondrous significance and design of the covenant into which they had entered; and in 1836 already had thousands obeyed its initial command : " Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee."

This was what the rise of Zion in Kirtland signified, and the gathering together of the saints, first in Ohio, next in Missouri, then in Illinois, and lastly in the valleys of Utah.

The command had been well obeyed in 1836. The saints, as we have seen, had gathered in the two States of Ohio and Missouri; Zion had risen in Kirtland ; a temple was being reared ; the apostleship was about to be conferred, and the design to send the twelve to foreign nations to gather an Israel was already revolving in the Prophet's mind. Tens of thousands in Great Britain were soon to hear Jehovah's command: "Get thee out of thy country ! "

And the design was the same as of old: " That I, the God of Israel, may be the God of this people, and in them fulfill my everlasting purposes!"

And what of Jehovah's promises unto such a people? Shall not the God of Latter-day Israel keep his part and fulfill his oath as of old ? Yea, verily; and the words of that everlasting oath are in force to them :

"And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee and make thy name great : and thou shalt be a blessing:

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse

him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

Again it is a promised nationality to an Israel. And now the people known as Mormons are that Israel. The oath, made unto them by him who has covenanted with them to be their God, means all this and nothing less.